The Good Ol' Days of QBasic Nibbles

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2022-05-14 05:30:13

Let’s talk about an ancient programming language! I think we can all learn things from history, and it gives us grounding to realize that our time is just one time among many, to see what people in the past did differently, what they got wrong that we would never do now, and also to see what they got right.

Do you remember MS-DOS? Do you remember that it came with an interpreted programming language? From MS-DOS 5 onwards, it came with not Python, not Javascript or R or Matlab, but a dialect of BASIC. But I think most people, especially most people my age who were children at the height of the MS-DOS era, remember it for the games, the two sample programs that came with it, namely Gorillas and Nibbles (their name for Snake).

Nibbles is extra near and dear to my heart because not only is it the game that I better enjoyed, but more interestingly because it’s the first “large program” that I ever did work on (for me as a child, “large” meant multiple subroutines), and the first existing program I ever modified.

So recently, I tried to see if I could find it. And indeed, I could. I just needed DosBox, the QBasic interpreter (you want QBasic EN 1.1), to run it. After that, you just need the program itself, after which, you can throw them in a directory, “mount” it from inside DosBox, and run QBASIC.EXE and use its very discoverable interface (by 90’s standards).